Teaching Beyond the Data Points and Fidelity to the Curriculum SLIDE DECK
Teaching Beyond the Data Points and Fidelity to the Curriculum SLIDE DECK
CHAPTER Twenty
If You Are a Teacher Reading This in a Quiet Classroom
On passion, advocacy, the limits
of credentialing, and what no data point has already told you
You do not need to have
lived this to teach it well. You do need to stop assuming the data point in
front of you has already told you everything.
This chapter is addressed to you — the teacher who is reading this in a
planning period, or at home after the students have left, or late at night when
the grading is done and the quiet of the room is finally available. The teacher
who went into education because something pulled them there — a sense of
justice, a love of learning, a specific memory of a teacher who changed things
for them, some version of the altruistic drive that brings people into a
profession that does not pay what it should and does not support what it
promises.
I want to talk to you the way I needed someone to talk to me when I was
starting out: honestly, with respect, and with the same impatience I still feel
toward a system that consistently underestimates what teachers and children are
capable of.
On Passion and Why It Is Not Enough
One of the traits I developed as a child with dyslexia was an
overdeveloped sense of justice. Not an unusual outcome for a child who has been
failed by systems — the experience of being on the receiving end of low
expectations and indifferent institutions tends to produce, in certain
temperaments, a fierce and permanent drive to make sure it does not happen to
other people. That drive took me into special education, into my master's
degree, into twenty-six years of RTI committees and IEP meetings and letters to
principals and school boards and the state of Arizona that got no response.
Passion is essential. I will say that unambiguously and without
qualification. A teacher without passion is producing outcomes without
investment, instruction without the emotional engine that makes children
believe the material is worth their effort. The teacher who loves learning —
who is genuinely curious, who finds the world interesting, who cannot help but
share that interest — transfers something to their students that no curriculum
can provide and no fidelity checklist can measure.
But passion without craft is enthusiasm without direction. And passion
without humility becomes the thing I was accused of — more than once, in more
than one meeting — which was being a know-it-all. I did not receive that
accusation with the equanimity I should have, and in retrospect I understand
why it was made even when I disagreed with it. A teacher who has survived
something, or studied something deeply, or built something that works, can
mistake the certainty of their own experience for a complete picture. The
experience is real. The picture is never complete.
You do not need to have lived dyslexia to teach a dyslexic child. You do
not need to have been a struggling reader to understand what struggling readers
need. What you need is the genuine, sustained curiosity about this specific
child in front of you — the willingness to ask what they know, what they love,
what they are afraid to fail at, what the data point has not told you — and to
let the answer shape your practice. That curiosity is the thing that experience
produces when experience is metabolized honestly. It can also be developed
deliberately, without the experience, by any teacher willing to do the work.
Passion without humility becomes certainty. And
certainty stops a teacher from asking the question that the next student most
needs them to ask.
The Profile You Are Looking For
In every classroom, there are students whose reading data tells one story
and whose oral performance tells a different one. These are the students who
cannot decode at grade level but speak with a vocabulary and syntactic
complexity that exceeds what the reading test reveals. They answer
comprehension questions correctly when the passage is read aloud to them. They
participate in discussion with insight and precision. They follow complex oral
instructions and miss simple written ones. They are often labeled lazy, or
inattentive, or low — and they are none of those things. They are strong-oracy,
weak-decoding, and the instructional approach that serves the average
struggling reader may not be what they need.
The informal assessment is simple and takes about ten minutes. Read a
grade-level passage aloud and ask comprehension questions. If the student
performs substantially better on listening comprehension than on reading
comprehension, you have found the profile. The bridge is what needs building.
The palace is already there.
Once you have identified the profile, the instructional implications
follow directly from this book: do not limit the language input to the decoding
level. Read aloud above the decoding ceiling. Build vocabulary through
listening and discussion while simultaneously building decoding through
explicit, systematic phonics instruction. Pair every text encounter with both
auditory and visual input. Find the text that is worth the frustration. Do not
let the leveled reader be the only reading experience these students have.
The students most likely to have this profile in your classroom are the
ones who have been read to extensively, who come from homes where language is
rich even when print is not — and, frequently, the students who have been in
special education long enough to have developed strong listening comprehension
through years of being read to and talked at, even as their decoding stalled.
They are also disproportionately English language learners whose Spanish, or
Somali, or Arabic vocabulary is strong and whose English decoding is
appropriately early-stage. Do not let the decoding level define the
comprehension ceiling.
◆
A Working Reference: The Book's Core Science in Brief
Orthographic mapping
(Kilpatrick): the process by which a word's visual form, pronunciation, and
meaning become permanently bound. Requires phonemic awareness as a
prerequisite; is accelerated by multimodal, high-repetition, emotionally
engaged exposure. Produces automatic word recognition. Disrupted in dyslexia by
phonological processing deficits.
The Simple View of
Reading (Gough & Tunmer): reading comprehension = decoding × language
comprehension. A deficit in either component produces reading difficulty.
Dyslexia is primarily a decoding deficit; the language comprehension system is
intact. Instruction should address decoding directly while keeping language
comprehension active through listening, discussion, and oral performance.
Intrinsic motivation and
real stakes (Deci & Ryan; Ranganath & Gruber): curiosity and genuine
motivation produce neurochemical conditions that enhance memory consolidation.
Frustration-level text, matched to comprehension rather than decoding, in the
presence of genuine interest, outperforms instructional-level text in
conditions of boredom or anxiety. The emotional context is part of the
mechanism, not decoration around it.
Multimodal encoding
(cross-modal binding research): information encoded through multiple
simultaneous sensory channels produces stronger, more durable neural
representations. The see-it-hear-it-say-it rule is a direct application of this
principle. Songs embed words in rhythmic and melodic context, creating
redundant retrieval pathways. Drama embodies vocabulary in sensorimotor
experience, strengthening both meaning and form.
Expectation effects
(Rosenthal; IEP quality research): teacher and institutional expectations
measurably influence student outcomes, independent of the student's actual
ability. IEP goals set at the level of current performance, rather than
potential performance, produce self-fulfilling outcomes. High expectations,
applied consistently through instruction and goal-setting, are among the
highest-leverage interventions available.
The See-It-Hear-It Loop in a Forty-Five-Minute
Period
You do not have twenty days. You have forty-five minutes, or sixty, or
ninety if you are lucky, and most of that time is already spoken for by the
curriculum your district has adopted and the pacing guide your administration
expects you to follow. I understand this. I spent years negotiating between
what I knew worked and what the institution required, and it is not a
comfortable place to work.
Here is what is possible inside the constraints:
✦ Every
read-aloud puts the text in student hands. This costs nothing and takes no
additional time. Print the passage, put it on the desk, and let students follow
along as you read. The loop is running from the first word.
✦ Five
minutes of choral reading at the start of the period. The same text, read
together, everyone following. It feels like a warm-up. It is orthographic
mapping at scale.
✦ One song
per unit, with lyrics posted or distributed. Teach it over the course of the
unit, not all at once. Return to it. It does not have to be a full performance.
It has to recur.
✦ One
archaeological word dig per class period — one word, excavated in situ, as it
appears in the text. Prefix, root, suffix, denotation, connotation. Three to
five minutes. Done consistently, it builds the morphological vocabulary that
standardized tests measure and vocabulary lists never produce.
✦ One
Socratic question per week, addressed to the whole class, with partner talk
before whole-group response. Not a quiz. A real question that the text doesn't
fully answer. The oral language engagement that this produces is language
comprehension instruction happening in real time.
✦ One piece
of readers' theater per unit — a script, a scene, any text performed rather
than silently read. It does not require costumes. It requires that students
stand up, hold the text, and say the words aloud in front of other people. The
stakes do not have to be high. They just have to be real.
None of these require a new curriculum. None require administrative
approval. None cost money. All of them can begin tomorrow, inside whatever
constraints you are currently working in. They are not a full program. They are
the minimum viable version of the principles this book has described, installed
inside a conventional classroom by a teacher who is willing to try one thing at
a time.
Advocating Inside the System
I was told, more than once, that I was disruptive. That I was a
know-it-all. That I should support the team's decisions rather than challenging
them in front of families. I was eventually pushed out of the classroom I had
built because I would not stop advocating for children whose IEPs had not
changed in three years while their reading had not changed in three years, and
the institution had decided that my advocacy was more costly than the problem I
was identifying.
I am telling you this not to make you afraid, but to make you realistic.
Advocacy inside an institution has costs, and those costs are not distributed
equally — they fall harder on teachers who are already in precarious positions,
on teachers of color, on teachers in under-resourced schools where
administrative tolerance for dissent is lowest. I am not going to tell you to
spend your credibility on every fight. But I am going to tell you that some
fights are worth it, and the fights worth having are the ones where a specific
child's trajectory is at stake.
Inside the IEP process, advocacy looks like this: asking that goals be
written to potential rather than to current performance. Requesting that
progress data be normed rather than curriculum-based. Naming, in writing, when
a child has made no progress in three years and the document has not changed.
Staying on RTI and MTSS committees even when you are not a special education
teacher, because those committees are where children who are falling through
the cracks are supposed to be caught, and somebody has to be in the room who is
paying attention.
The institution will not always respond well to this. The institution has
its own interests, and those interests do not always align with the interests
of the child in the chair at the meeting. Your job — your actual professional
and ethical job, regardless of what the fidelity checklist says — is to be the
fiduciary for that child. That does not mean being reckless with your own
career. It means knowing which hill you are willing to defend, and defending it
clearly, with documentation, in writing.
Your actual professional and ethical job —
regardless of what the fidelity checklist says — is to be the fiduciary for
that child.
On Credentials, Experience, and What Each Cannot
Replace
The most formally credentialed teachers I encountered in my career were
not always the most effective with the children who needed the most. The
credential ensures a floor of competence and a breadth of exposure; it does not
ensure the specific curiosity about the specific child that effective teaching
requires. The teacher who has survived a reading difficulty, or a disability,
or a childhood that the system failed to serve, has a different kind of
knowledge — embodied, motivational, resistant to abstraction — that no
credential can produce.
Both kinds of knowledge matter. What I am arguing against is the
credential that becomes its own justification — the assumption that because you
have been trained in a program, you understand what is happening in front of
you. The program trained you in the average case. The child in front of you is
not average, and neither is the child next to them.
The alternative is not less training. It is training plus the sustained
humility to keep asking: what am I missing? What does this data point not tell
me? What would I find if I looked at this child through the lens of their
strengths rather than their deficits? What would Montessori do with this child?
What would an Orton-Gillingham specialist see? What would a Reggio Emilia
provocation look like for this specific curiosity?
The teacher who asks those questions, year after year, with genuine
interest in the answers, will become more effective over time in ways that no
amount of additional credentialing can replicate. The teacher who stops asking
them will plateau — competent, perhaps excellent on average, but missing the
children who are not served by average.
◆
The Science: What AI Can and Cannot Yet Do
Generative AI has arrived
in education with significant promise and significant limitations, and teachers
deserve an honest account of both. AI is currently excellent at producing text
at specified reading levels, generating readers' theater scripts on any topic,
creating differentiated comprehension questions, and summarizing research.
These are real gains for classroom teachers, and the readers' theater
application in particular removes the supply constraint that previously limited
how often embodied, performative reading instruction could occur.
What current AI cannot do
is replicate the Montessori manipulative — the hands-on, visual-spatial,
concrete representation of mathematical and linguistic concepts that has been
validated by a century of classroom practice. Ask the best available AI system
to generate the image that correctly shows how to use a stamp game or a bead
chain to teach multiplication, and it fails. Not because the concept is
obscure, but because the embodied, spatial, hands-on dimension of the learning
process is exactly what current AI — which operates entirely in the domain of
text and image — cannot fully represent or replicate.
This matters for teachers
because AI will be sold to school districts as a teaching solution, and it is
not — not yet, and perhaps not ever, for the dimensions of learning that most
require a human presence. The teacher who can use AI to generate a readers'
theater script in five minutes, and then bring the embodied, relational,
emotionally present dimension of performance to that script, is a teacher who
has correctly understood what the tool is for. The administrator who replaces
that teacher with a screen has made a different and more consequential error.
Finding Work Where You Are Valued
A friend told me, after I left teaching, that I should make sure I was
looking for work where I was valued — not just work that was bearable or
tolerable. I have thought about this advice often, because it is both true and,
for many teachers, practically difficult. Not every teacher has the option to
leave a position that is tolerable in search of one that is genuinely
supportive. Not every teacher can afford the gap between the job they have and
the job they want.
What I can say is this: the classroom you build is, within significant
constraints, yours. The relationship you have with the children in it is yours.
The decision to read aloud today, to sing a song, to stop at an unknown word
and treat it like an archaeological discovery — that decision is available to
you regardless of what the pacing guide says or what the administrator has
prioritized. The institution can take many things from a teacher. It cannot
take the quality of presence a teacher brings to the twenty minutes of
read-aloud.
The teachers who are leaving — and many are leaving, and the loss is real
and consequential for the children who needed what those teachers knew — are
leaving because they do not feel trusted, valued, or supported. That is the
institution's failure, and it deserves to be named as such. But the teachers
who stay, who find a way to do the work inside the constraints, who bring their
passion and their curiosity to a room that may not reward it adequately but
will be transformed by it — those teachers are the ones the children are
counting on.
The pendulum will swing. It has swung before — away from whole language,
back toward structured literacy; away from the accountability movement, toward
something that takes the whole child more seriously. The politicians and the
publishers and the billionaires who have treated education as a market to be
optimized will eventually be replaced by different politicians and different
priorities. What will remain, in every version of the system, is the need for a
teacher who loves learning, who shows up with their whole self, who treats
every child as worth the full investment of their professional knowledge and
their human attention.
That teacher cannot be automated. That teacher cannot be
curriculum-packaged. That teacher is why this book exists, and why I spent
twenty-six years trying to be one.
The institution can take many things from a
teacher. It cannot take the quality of presence a teacher brings to twenty
minutes of read-aloud.
The Last Thing
This book began with a child who could not read, sitting in a
second-grade classroom in Tucson, Arizona, who was told in various ways and
with varying degrees of kindness that reading was probably going to be hard for
him for a long time. It ends with that same child, now decades past those
classrooms, trying to give you something that was given to him in pieces, by
accident, by a series of people who did not know they were intervening — a
theater director, an uncle with a Christmas gift, a girl who said nothing
during a spelling test, an Oxford teacher in Tucson, a Swedish university, a
self-contained classroom full of children who taught him more than he taught
them.
The bridge has a name now. The mechanism is understood. The conditions
that produce it can be built deliberately, by a teacher or a parent or a school
that is willing to look at the child rather than the data point, to find the
text that is worth the frustration, to create the room where reading feels like
something that happens among people who trust each other.
You do not need to have lived this. You need to stop assuming the data
point has already told you everything. You need to ask what the child came in
wanting, and then build the room that gets them there.
And then you need to bring the popcorn.
Acting as a fiduciary for a child involves putting the student's interests above those of the institution, a role that the sources acknowledge carries significant professional risks.
According to the sources, the professional risks of this level of advocacy include:
- Reputational Damage: Teachers who challenge the status quo or the team's decisions may be labeled as "disruptive" or a "know-it-all". They may be pressured to support the team's consensus even when they believe it does not serve the child.
- Loss of Credibility: The sources warn that advocacy can be dismissed if it is perceived as certainty without humility. Spending your professional "credibility" on every minor disagreement can diminish your influence when major issues arise.
- Employment Instability: In extreme cases, the institution may decide that a teacher's advocacy is "more costly than the problem" being identified. The author notes they were eventually "pushed out of the classroom" because they refused to stop advocating for children whose progress had stalled for years.
- Unequal Distribution of Risk: These professional costs fall harder on certain individuals, specifically teachers of color, those in under-resourced schools, and those in precarious employment positions where administrative tolerance for dissent is lowest.
- Institutional Conflict: Because the interests of the institution do not always align with the interests of the child, acting as a fiduciary can place a teacher in direct opposition to their employer's priorities.
To navigate these risks, the sources suggest being strategic rather than reckless with your career. Effective advocacy involves knowing "which hill you are willing to defend" and ensuring all challenges are backed by clear documentation and writing.
✦ Chapter Takeaway ✦
You
do not need to have lived this to teach it well. You do need to stop assuming
the data point in front of you has already told you everything. Find the
profile — strong oracy, weak decoding — and teach to the palace while building
the bridge. Install the loop inside whatever constraints you have. Advocate in
writing for the children the document has undersold. Bring your passion and
your humility in equal measure. And remember that the institution can take many
things from you. It cannot take the twenty minutes of read-aloud you choose to
make matter.
Advocating for students during the Individualized Education Program (IEP) process requires a shift in perspective from viewing a student as a set of scores to seeing them as a complete individual. According to the sources, your professional and ethical role is to act as a fiduciary for the child, putting their interests above those of the institution.
Here is how to advocate effectively for your students during IEP meetings:
1. Challenge the Limits of the Data Point
The most important step in advocacy is to stop assuming the data point tells you everything. Data often underestimates what a child is capable of, particularly for students with a "strong-oracy, weak-decoding" profile.
- Identify the "Palace": If a student has high listening comprehension but low reading scores, advocate for instruction that builds on their strengths (the "palace") while simultaneously working on their weaknesses (the "bridge").
- Prevent a "Comprehension Ceiling": Ensure the team does not limit a student's access to complex language and concepts just because their decoding skills are lagging.
2. Set High Expectations in Goal Writing
Teacher expectations measurably influence student outcomes. When discussing goals:
- Write to Potential: Advocate for goals that are written to a student's potential rather than simply reflecting their current, often stalled, performance.
- Use Normed Data: Request that progress data be normed rather than strictly curriculum-based to get a truer sense of the student's growth relative to their peers.
3. Address Instructional Stagnation
If a child’s reading progress has stalled for years while their IEP remains unchanged, the system is failing them.
- Name it in Writing: Explicitly name when a child has made no progress in three years and the document has not been adjusted to address this.
- Defend the Child’s Trajectory: Choose the "fights worth having"—the moments where a specific child's future trajectory is at stake—and defend those positions with clear documentation and writing.
4. Balance Passion with Humility
While passion is the "emotional engine" of teaching, it must be tempered with craft and humility.
- Avoid the "Know-it-all" Trap: Advocacy can be dismissed if it is perceived as certainty without curiosity. Approach the meeting with sustained curiosity, asking what you might be missing about the student and looking at them through the lens of their strengths rather than just their deficits.
- Be Strategic: Acknowledge that advocacy has professional costs. It is important to know "which hill you are willing to defend" rather than spending your credibility on every minor disagreement.
5. Stay Involved Beyond the Meeting
Advocacy is a continuous process that happens outside the IEP room as well.
- Join Key Committees: Stay active on RTI (Response to Intervention) and MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports) committees. These are the spaces where students falling through the cracks are supposed to be identified and supported.
- Provide Immediate Classroom Support: While waiting for systemic changes, you can advocate for the student by providing high-leverage, low-cost interventions like choral reading, multimodal encoding (see-it-hear-it-say-it), and readers' theater to ensure they are making progress in real time.
Note: While these sources provide strong philosophical and tactical advice for teachers, they do not detail the specific legal rights of parents or the exact federal mandates of the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). You may want to independently verify the specific legal timelines and procedural safeguards required in your local jurisdiction.
Acting as a fiduciary for a child involves putting the student's interests above those of the institution, a role that the sources acknowledge carries significant professional risks.
According to the sources, the professional risks of this level of advocacy include:
- Reputational Damage: Teachers who challenge the status quo or the team's decisions may be labeled as "disruptive" or a "know-it-all". They may be pressured to support the team's consensus even when they believe it does not serve the child.
- Loss of Credibility: The sources warn that advocacy can be dismissed if it is perceived as certainty without humility. Spending your professional "credibility" on every minor disagreement can diminish your influence when major issues arise.
- Employment Instability: In extreme cases, the institution may decide that a teacher's advocacy is "more costly than the problem" being identified. The author notes they were eventually "pushed out of the classroom" because they refused to stop advocating for children whose progress had stalled for years.
- Unequal Distribution of Risk: These professional costs fall harder on certain individuals, specifically teachers of color, those in under-resourced schools, and those in precarious employment positions where administrative tolerance for dissent is lowest.
- Institutional Conflict: Because the interests of the institution do not always align with the interests of the child, acting as a fiduciary can place a teacher in direct opposition to their employer's priorities.
To navigate these risks, the sources suggest being strategic rather than reckless with your career. Effective advocacy involves knowing "which hill you are willing to defend" and ensuring all challenges are backed by clear documentation and writing.
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